BBC News Online: World: Africa

Libya 'to buy all Caribbean bananas'

Gaddafi wants to break European 'stranglehold'

Libya is reported to have offered to buy all the bananas produced in the Caribbean region at above market prices.

Caribbean officials say the proposal was made by the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, when he hosted a controversial visit to Tripoli just over a week ago by the prime ministers of several Caribbean islands.

A Libyan delegation is due to arrive in the Caribbean later this month to make arrangements.

It has also emerged, by way of representatives sent by St Lucia and Antigua, that Colonel Gaddafi has offered to buy up the total production of Caribbean bananas at above market price.

This is to enable the banana-producing islands to break free from what the colonel is said to have described as the economic stranglehold of Europe and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Support for Africa

The Caribbean leaders went to Libya to take part in celebrations marking the anniversary of the 1969 revolution that brought Colonel Gaddafi to power.

The prime ministers of St Lucia and Antigua pulled out of the trip at the last moment, reportedly in response to pressure from a bemused US State Department.

It is not entirely clear whether Colonel Gaddafi's banana offer will become a reality or indeed what his thinking is in offering it.

It is by no means the first apparently philanthropic gesture that he has made recently.

In the last two years, Libya has been bankrolling a range of impoverished countries in the African Sahara and has begun supplying petroleum to fuel-starved Zimbabwe at knock-down prices.